Andrew Macdonald, "The Turner Diaries" and "Hunter" (1978; 1984)

Macdonald is the pseudonym of William Pierce. These two novels are renowned as essential reading for the current generation of American neo-nazis, and circulated in photocopied versions throughout the 1980s. More recently, they came to wider attention when it was discovered that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, had been selling them at local gun shows. His interest in these books raised the spectre that Pierce's novels were inspiring "copy-cat" types of crimes.

Both novels are awkwardly written, pedantic, and more than a little amateurish. Pierce's aim in writing them was clearly not to create great art, however, but to address a cadre of his "racial comrades" in a way that might speak to them in a more evocative or effective way than a direct political treatise. This development is mirrored in the move in the 1990s towards using hate music to win over converts to "white" racism who might not be inclined to read Rosenberg, Rockwell, Duke, and Hitler.

Of the two, The Turner Diaries is far more readable, though Pierce apparently believed Hunter was far more realistic. The Turner Diaries essentially narrates a form of apocalypse story, more or less seen through the eyes of a single male participant, where global racial conflict leads to the rise of an all-white racial state in North America (and perhaps beyond). Hunter also focuses on the efforts of a single 'revolutionary' assassin who participates in underground efforts to overthrow the US government and spread racial hatred.

Racial, gender, and political characterizations in these books are simple, hateful, and loaded with very troubling stereotypes. They are not for the faint of heart. In my research on the US and Canadian far right, however, I've seen these books referred to so many times, I felt I needed to read them to understand some of the references, and to better get 'inside the heads' of the kinds of far right volunteers that I am studying.

I found it particularly intriguing that the date of the beginning of the revolution in The Turner Diaries is September 11. Given that the book was published in 1978, the coincidence is haunting.